Impossible differential cryptanalysis of reduced round HIGHT

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Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Fen Edebiyat Fakültesi, Matematik Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2009

Öğrenci: CİHANGİR TEZCAN

Danışman: ALİ DOĞANAKSOY

Özet:

Design and analysis of lightweight block ciphers have become more popular due to the fact that the future use of block ciphers in ubiquitous devices is generally assumed to be extensive. In this respect, several lightweight block ciphers are designed, of which HIGHT is proposed by Hong et al. at CHES 2006 as a constrained hardware oriented block cipher. HIGHT is shown to be highly convenient for extremely constrained devices such as RFID tags and sensor networks and it became a standard encryption algorithm in South Korea. Impossible differential cryptanalysis is a technique discovered by Biham et al. and is applied to many block ciphers including Skipjack, IDEA, Khufu, Khafre, HIGHT, AES, Serpent, CRYPTON, Twofish, TEA, XTEA and ARIA. The security of HIGHT against impossible differential attacks is investigated both by Hong et al. and Lu: An 18-round impossible differential attack is given in the proposal of HIGHT and Lu improved this result by giving a 25-round impossible differential attack. Moreover, Lu found a 28-round related-key impossible differential attack which is the best known attack on HIGHT. In related-key attacks, the attacker is assumed to know the relation between the keys but not the keys themselves. In this study, we further analyzed the resistance of HIGHT against impossible differential attacks by mounting a new 26-round impossible differential attack and a new 31-round related-key impossible differential attack. Although our results are theoretical in nature, they show new results in HIGHT and reduce its security margin further.